The Anthropology of Extinction

Description

Extinction as a force shaping socio-cultural and biological life

We live in an era marked by an accelerating rate of species death, but since the early days of the discipline, anthropology has contemplated the death of languages, cultural groups, and ways of life. The essays in this collection examine processes of—and our understanding of—extinction across various domains. The contributors argue that extinction events can be catalysts for new cultural, social, environmental, and technological developments—that extinction processes can, paradoxically, be productive as well as destructive. The essays consider a number of widely publicized cases: island species in the Galápagos and Madagascar; the death of Native American languages; ethnic minorities under pressure to assimilate in China; cloning as a form of species regeneration; and the tiny hominid Homo floresiensis fossils ("hobbits") recently identified in Indonesia. The Anthropology of Extinction offers compelling explorations of issues of widespread concern.

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Accumulating Absence—Cultural Productions of the Sixth Extinction \ Genese Marie Sodikoff

Part 1. The Social Construction of Biotic Extinction
1. A Species Apart: Ideology, Science, and the End of Life \ Janet Chernela
2. From Ecocide to Genetic Rescue: Can Technoscience Save the Wild? \ Tracey Heatherington
3. Totem and Taboo Reconsidered: Endangered Species and Moral Practice in Madagascar \ Genese Marie Sodikoff

Part 2. Endangered Species and Emergent Identities
4. Tortoise Soup for the Soul: Finding a Space for Human History in Evolution's Laboratory \ Jill Constantino
5. Global Environmentalism and the Emergence of Indigeneity: The Politics of Cultural and Biological Diversity in China \ Michael Hathaway

Part 3. Red-Listed Languages
6. Last Words, Final Thoughts: Collateral Extinctions in Maliseet Language Death \ Bernard C. Perley
7. Dying Young: Pidgins, Creoles, and Other Contact Languages as Endangered Languages \ Paul B. Garrett

Part 4. Prehistories of an Apex Predator
8. Demise of the Bet Hedgers: A Case Study of Human Impacts on Past and Present Lemurs of Madagascar \ Laurie R. Godfrey and Emilienne Rasoazanabary
9. Disappearing Wildmen: Capture, Extirpation, and Extinction as Regular Components of Representations of Putative Hairy Hominoids \ Gregory Forth

Epilogue: Prolegomenon for a New Totemism \ Peter M. Whiteley

List of Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Sciences de la nature
• Sciences de l'environnement
• Life Sciences
• Sciences et techniques
• África
• Linguistics
• Biology
• General officer
• Philosophy of science
• Semiotics
• Latin America
• Language
• Anthropology
• Ecology
• General
• Langage
• 454 Life Sciences
• Africa
• Asia
• Science
• Culture

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 08 décembre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253005458
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Anthropology of Extinction
The Anthropology of Extinction
ESSAYS ON CULTURE AND SPECIES DEATH
Edited by
Genese Marie Sodikoff
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
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2012 by Indiana University Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The anthropology of extinction : essays on culture and species death / edited by Genese Marie Sodikoff.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-35713-7 (cloth : alk. paper)-ISBN 978-0-253-22364-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)-ISBN 978-0-253-00545-8 (e-book) 1. Culture-Philosophy. 2. Anthropology/Philosophy. 3. Extinction (Biology) 4. Extinction (Psychology) 5. Anthropological linguistics. I. Sodikoff, Genese Marie, [date]
GN357.A57 2012
306.01--dc23 2011024026
1 2 3 4 5 17 16 15 14 13 12
A shift in the structure of experience told the farmer on his Andean plateau Your way of life is obsolescent. -But hasn t it always been so? T HE D ISPLACED OF C APITAL , A NNE W INTERS , 2004
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION. ACCUMULATING ABSENCE: Cultural Productions of the Sixth Extinction \ Genese Marie Sodikoff
PART 1. THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF BIOTIC EXTINCTION
1. A SPECIES APART: Ideology, Science, and the End of Life \ Janet Chernela
2. FROM ECOCIDE TO GENETIC RESCUE: Can Technoscience Save the Wild? \ Tracey Heatherington
3. TOTEM AND TABOO RECONSIDERED: Endangered Species and Moral Practice in Madagascar \ Genese Marie Sodikoff
PART 2. ENDANGERED SPECIES AND EMERGENT IDENTITIES
4. TORTOISE SOUP FOR THE SOUL: Finding a Space for Human History in Evolution s Laboratory \ Jill Constantino
5. GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTALISM AND THE EMERGENCE OF INDIGENEITY: The Politics of Cultural and Biological Diversity in China \ Michael Hathaway
PART 3. RED-LISTED LANGUAGES
6. LAST WORDS, FINAL THOUGHTS: Collateral Extinctions in Maliseet Language Death \ Bernard C. Perley
7. DYING YOUNG: Pidgins, Creoles, and Other Contact Languages as Endangered Languages \ Paul B. Garrett
PART 4. PREHISTORIES OF AN APEX PREDATOR
8. DEMISE OF THE BET HEDGERS: A Case Study of Human Impacts on Past and Present Lemurs of Madagascar \ Laurie R. Godfrey and Emilienne Rasoazanabary
9. DISAPPEARING WILDMEN: Capture, Extirpation, and Extinction as Regular Components of Representations of Putative Hairy Hominoids \ Gregory Forth
EPILOGUE: Prolegomenon for a New Totemism \ Peter M. Whiteley
List of Contributors
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book finally came to fruition thanks to everyone s steadfast dedication and to the people who have supported this project along the way. I thank Alex Hinton for having the good instinct to connect me with Fran Mascia-Lees about the possibility of the Anthropology Department of Rutgers-New Brunswick hosting a symposium on extinction that would draw on the strengths of the discipline s subfields. Fran s enthusiastic support and the generosity of the entire Anthropology Department enabled us to have a sustained dialogue about a formative subject of anthropology, an issue of major global significance, and a universal experience of human being. I am indebted to all who participated, including those who do not appear in these pages but who enriched our discussion with their knowledge and insights: John Colarusso, David Hughes, Rob Scott, and Rick Schroeder. I also thank the Rutgers University Research Council and the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights at Rutgers-Newark for additional support. I owe my gratitude to Rebecca Tolen, Molly Mullin, and an anonymous reviewer for their wise and thoughtful suggestions.
And finally I will add, on a very personal note, that during the group s preparation for the symposium, the theme of extinction had become a palpable mood in my home as my mother, Inez Naples Kemptner, who was visiting my family for a last time in the summer of 2008, had grown too weak from cancer to return to Seattle and died in New Jersey that August. She would have been so proud to see this book in print.
The Anthropology of Extinction
INTRODUCTION ACCUMULATING ABSENCE:
CULTURAL PRODUCTIONS OF THE SIXTH EXTINCTION
Genese Marie Sodikoff
In a book published at the cusp of the new millennium entitled Conversations about the End of Time, screenwriter Jean-Claude Carri re observes that the future anterior-the tense used to describe an action that will be finished in the future-is fading from everyday speech. He does not comment on the irony that this grammatical form should fall into disuse at this particular time, when projections about earthly life call for such temporal specificity. Scientists have dubbed the current epoch the sixth mass extinction because the current rate of species death is more than a hundred times greater than nature s chronic winnowing (Angier 2009:3). At some point in the near future, scholars say, 16,928 still extant species will have vanished (Zabarenko 2009). At the same time, indigenous languages, vehicles of entire cosmologies, are succumbing at a rate of two per month as their last speakers perish. Of the 6,700 extant languages-already reduced by two-thirds since precolonial times-experts estimate that three thousand will have gone silent within thirty years (Miller 2002). Better than any other verb tense, the future anterior captures the jarring imminence of categorical loss. What are grammatical tenses, asks Carri re, if not the painstaking attempt of our precise, meticulous minds to envisage all the possible shapes that time can take, all the ways in which we relate to time within the domain of our thoughts and actions? (Carri re 2001:97).
Thought experiments about what Earth might look like when we too are gone influence decisions in the present (e.g., Weisman 2007). In the midst of a heated politics of global climate change, terrorism, oil spills, war, and the corporate drive to expand into new frontiers of nature, the possibility (and denial) of self-extinction, or at least some dramatic alteration in life as we know it, grips the social imagination. This historical epoch has been named the Anthropocene for the huge impact humankind has made on the Earth s ecosystems (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). Unlike the first five extinctions (the last being the Cretaceous-Tertiary event that decimated the dinosaurs and enabled the florescence of birds and mammals), the sixth extinction is neither abrupt nor spectacular. No smashing asteroids or giant volcanic eruptions. No global pandemics as yet. Only the slow, cumulative effects of greenhouse gases, rain forest depletion, and a brand of imperialism that extols the virtues of high mass consumption.
What is being done about extinction? What is being thought? Linguists and scientists are undertaking discovery and recovery missions, recording for posterity the last words of indigenous language speakers and the characteristics of rare and living dead species, ones destined to die out as a result of habitat degradation (Harrison 2007; Tilman et al. 1994). The United Nations has launched publicity campaigns to stir global interest in the phenomena of language death and biodiversity loss. One may put a positive spin on the process of homogenization, seeing an opportunity for forging closer bonds among societies by ironing out linguistic and cultural difference (see Miller 2002). But the more typical response to extinction is to resist it, or to resist the often flawed strategies to prevent it. In the early 2000s, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) created an Atlas of the World s Languages in Danger as part of its effort to preserve intangible heritage. The UN named 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity in tribute to the problem of species extinctions, which have destabilized the natural infrastructures that are so integral to the world economy (Blua 2010). If there is a silver lining in the sixth extinction, it lies in our heightened appreciation of the biological and cultural diversity of Earth s unraveling fabric.
Just as the death of biotic species clears space for emergent creatures, extinction events propel the evolution of cultural productions, including science and technology, politics, history, and art. The prospect of human extinction has animated a doomsday genre of film and fiction, for example. This genre depicts alien invasions and zombie epidemics that annihilate the human species. The life-sucking creatures that fascinate us on the screen and page dramatize and invert the human-nonhuman relationship. From the viewpoint of, say, an Egyptian Barbary sheep ( Ammotragus lervia ornata ), a Guam rail ( Gallirallus owstoni ), or a member of any number of species that have gone extinct in the wild, humans are the monsters to be feared.
The specter of self-extinction in contemporary pop culture might have surprised science fiction writer H. G. Wells, who in an 1894 essay, The Extinction of Man, opines, It is part of the excessive egotism of the human animal that the bare idea of its extinction seems incredible to it. A world without us! it says, as a heady young Cephalaspis [an extinct genus of fish] might have said it in the old Silu